


An Examination of Supposedly Fated Moirails

by Quietserval



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 21:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7774882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietserval/pseuds/Quietserval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I think that even when there is serendipity you gotta work at it or it will all fall apart for nothing.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Examination of Supposedly Fated Moirails

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DMM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DMM/gifts).



Life after the game is content. Despite the odds, all of the respective players of SGRUB and SBURB were the new world, even those who hadn't made it along the way.

(Aradia brought all of the dreaming dead through a backdoor in the world’s code. How she found a way through at all is something she refused to say other than to give whoever asked the finger guns and a wink.)

The new post game world was a vibrant mix of the two sessions that brought it forth; humans, trolls, and carapacians mingling together, if not peacefully, then in a way that warranted mutual interspecies respect. 

Several years passed and most everyone had either settled into comfortable patterns of life or were still making their way, trying to figure out their place in the new world while reconciling with the actions and weight of their past.

Everyone drifted away but not far enough that someone from their group didn't run into each other in the city during the weekdays or during the frequent gatherings that were organized on monthly basis.

Dave and Karkat found themselves a small house, far enough away from the city that its sounds do not bother Dave, that sat at the edge of a heavily wooded park.

Dave converted the basement into a studio, sound proofed, so the neighbors don’t complain about sick beats making the glass in their windows shake at 2 AM. The house was littered with romance novels, dvd cases, knitted throws, and an ever expanding collection of fossils and weird shit in jars. When Aradia was not off on her latest exploratory mission of the new world, she and Dave met up and chattered excitedly over the new fauna this mashed up world produced.

Karkat made himself comfortable, settling into the house and making it home. He gorged himself on new media, films, books and plays. Dave helped him set up a blog on which Karkat ripped apart, -ahem-, critiqued, the aforementioned new media, analyzed characters and relationships, and educated obtuse assholes on why their opinions on cinema were wrong.

There also may or may not have been a secret word processing document in which Karkat was writing the world’s next great romantic novel. But whoever told you about this hypothetical, epic in progress was a fucking liar. Really, why is this still being discussed when there are narratively significant matters to discuss?!

In the spans of time between visiting friends, rebuilding relationships, movie marathons, and reviewing the latest cinematic garbage, Karkat felt an absence. It gaped like the space left behind by a missing tooth. Of course, he kept poking at it, reminding himself that it was no longer there.

Of all of the players, there was one he had not seen hide nor hair of since arriving in the new world. Even before winning the game; if the accounts from the other players were to be believed. Karkat himself had barely seen Gamzee around the meteor, save when he was lurking in dark hallways or fanning Vriska with oversized palm fronds. Now it appeared that he was completely gone.

Gamzee had been one of his best friends on Alternia. Then the Game crushed their lives like a scurrying scuttlebeast under an oversized shoe. Of course everything fell apart further and went to shit on the meteor. He could have, should have, been a better leader and kept everyone together and alive. But, now everyone was back and alive; mending themselves, in whatever form that took. Except for Gamzee. Should he have made more of an effort to talk to him? He could have tried something, maybe even talked Gamzee down before he could go on any other potential murderous rampages. 

He could have…

When his thoughts spiraled down into the “what ifs” and “what could have beens’, Dave would come to him. Catching him before self-loathing sunk his mood down further than it already had. Dave would lead Karkat over to the couch to watch one of old films Karkat downloaded from Earth’s databases. Sometimes they talked about what was on their minds, rehashing old conversations from the meteor. Other times they sat close together --Dave spilling over into Karkat’s lap, his voice a comforting drone recounting what he learned in his foundation archeology course or straying into ideas for new songs. Other times it would dissolve into other, intimate activities that left them both comforted by each others presence.  

The ache still remained for all Karkat could do nothing for it.

***

There was a half-hearted attempt at a nature trail, the gravel path overgrown with weeds and the branches stretching overhead to form a tunnel-like canopy, parallel to the house. Karkat walked it occasionally, somewhat in awe that it was possible to wander around in practically the middle of nowhere. He expected monstrous beasts or murderous neighbors jumping out from behind the bushes to ambush him. Instead, he saw the occasional passerby enjoying the park and colorful, feathered reptiles (microraptors, the voice in his head prompted) that trilled in the trees and bothered the other avians in the park.  
This particular trail was empty and clearly not often traversed, but Karkat did not mind. 

During one of those walks Karkat stumbled across it.

Bored of walking the same path, Karkat decided to take an alternate route that deviated from the neatly trimmed trees of the park into the woods. He had noticed it on previous walks but never bothered to explore it. Five minutes down the new trail and he was elbow-deep in thorn bushes that reached from both sides of the trail like creeping hands. Tiny, menacing brown burrs snagged his clothes with every other step. He could have turned around anytime but Karkat Vantas was not about to let some barbed spherical piece of flora keep him from enjoying his leisurely, relaxing nature walk!

After tripping on a particularly obdurate root that had no business sticking out that high for unsuspecting beings to snag their foot on, Karkat saw it.

Streaked with dirt and near overgrown with grass and creepers, somehow managing to still have magnets still clinging on the front. Magnets, how do they even motherfucking work? (He laughed bitterly at the phrase). He recognized it as the thermal hull that Gamzee had been stuffed into. The last time he had seen it was when he and the rest of the remaining players had gathered before divvying up the task of who would fight who.

There is no way that, after all this time, that he could still be in there, right?

Right?

It might not even be the same thermal hull, Karkat reasoned as he walked over to it. People dumped random crap in the woods all the time! Someone couldn’t be half assed enough to drag their trash to the curb and instead dumped it here. Yes, this was a perfectly viable option.

Hand shaking with a slight tremor, Karkat reached out and grasped the handle of the lower door of the thermal hull. He hesitated, horrific images of desiccated corpses rising in his mind. He really needed to stop watching those daywalker movies with Dave before going to sleep. Bracing himself for the worst, Karkat wrenched the heavy door open.

There was nothing in the fridge. Not even the faint remains of blood stains. Karkat let out a shuddering breath he did not realize that he was holding. He let go of the handle and the door swung shut.

Of course Gamzee would not be here.

***  
He kept coming back to the trail, venturing further and further each time. Sometimes off the trail completely and into the surrounding underbrush. Not quite searching, because there was no guarantee that Gamzee was even there.

Karkat had not told anyone else what he was doing. No point in bothering without concrete proof. Dave did notice that something was different. He cornered Karkat one late evening in the kitchen as he returned from class. He looked at Karkat over the rims of his shades. 

“Wow, Karkat you sure have been taking a lot of those walks through the woods lately. Did you decide to become one with nature and don the flower crown of natural zen?”

“The woods are peaceful and beautiful at this time of year,” Karkat huffed, crossing his arms and looking down at the tiled floor of the kitchen. “I am out appreciating them on a daily basis before the frigid, unforgiving winter reduces the trees to arboreal matchsticks. There is no other reason at all! No ulterior motive that could arouse suspicion to cast doubt that I could be doing anything else out there!” 

Dave pulled his shades down to give Karkat a long look. Karkat stared back at him, his expression set. Then he shrugged. “Ooookay, bro. Do your thing if it helps you chill.”

“I will, thank you! Now what do you want for dinner. We still have those leftover tamales.”

Karkat continued to search through the park, the wild offshoot trail where he came across the thermal hull, and the surrounding woods. He kept returning to where he found the thermal hull, half expecting to find Gamzee sitting there, his search radiating from there. 

For over two weeks, Karkat overturned logs, checked the benches in the park for sleeping figures, and stuck his head into more suspicious burrows and shallow caverns then was strictly considered safe. 

Tired from his latest efforts, Kakat stomped over to sit down on top of a boulder. Karkat was no closer to finding Gamzee today than he had for the past couple of weeks. His trousers had small rips in them and a grass stain the size of a baseball on his backside from his hurry to back away from an ominously rustling bush. (No one was there to witness his screech when he fell over, or when it turned out the source of the rustling had been an overgrown nutbeast).

There were old rusting cans, the labels turned white from exposure to sun and rain, scattered all about the boulder’s base. Inconsiderate littering Karkat supposed, half heartedly kicking one further into the bushes. The woods were quiet that day, except for the sound of birds and the hum of insects. He wanted to head back home, seeing no point in going any further today; but something stopped him from doing so.

A buzzing thrum running through his body, concentrated around his bloodpusher.  Huh. That was. New.

Karkat stood up and the thrumming sensation grew stronger. He clutched at his sweater right above his bloodpusher, his pulse beating harder and harder, as though he had been running for an hour instead of leisurely picking his way through the woods.  He had never felt something like this before. It was either a sure sign that his consumption of caffeine was finally affecting him, or some latent Game shit that was deciding to manifest itself now.

He had a feeling that it was the latter.

Karkat decided to follow the feeling to see where it led him. His bloodpusher was no longer attempting to beat hard enough to bust out of his thoracic cavity but the thrum remained. 

He followed it, the feeling growing stronger as he headed in certain directions and weakening when he tried others, like an eerie game of Marco Polo, through the woods, the terrain steadily inclining until Karkat breathed heavily with each step. Trees clung to the ground with knotted roots and stretches of rocky outcroppings. Then the ground leveled out again and Karkat found himself stepping into a clearing. 

The clearing was only a few yards wide in either direction. Across from him was a mound of boulders, braided together with overgrown with tree roots. There was a hollow in between them, possibly the entrance to a small cave, like many that littered the area. There were more cans scattered around the clearing, newer than the ones he had come across earlier, and other detritus. The grass was flattened around the cave entranxe, as though someone had made it their life's mission to pace relentlessly over it.

Karkat stepped into the clearing and slowly approached the opening. He did not get far before a sharp snap somewhere off to his left side.

Karkat whipped around to face the sound, as the thrumming peaked, his pulse thundering, and slowly subsided. 

It was him. 

His hair was longer, falling down past his shoulders in a tangled, knotted mess. His face gaunt, carved into hollows, and the sclera of his eyes, partially visible through lanks of hair, approached a throbbing, painful red.  

Gamzee muttered something under his breath, intonation rising and falling, his eyes widening as he took Karkat in.  

***

(No, no, NO. Why was there someone here? IN HIS HIDDEN PLACE FREE OF ALL OTHERS. This was blasphemous wrong. Wrong. WRONG. NO ONE SHOULD BE HERE.)

***

“Gamzee.” Karkat stepped closer to him, slow and wary. He wanted to curse Gamzee out something fierce. For disappearing to fuck only knows where for sweeps. For not bothering once to contact anyone (him) to let them know where he was or what he was doing.  Apparently living in the woods was what! Instead Karkat let the frustration simmer down. There would be ample opportunity for a profanity laden grief session later, but he had to get Gamzee to the point where he could do that first.    

“Do you recognize me? Do you know who I am?”

Gamz paced back and forth, arms wrapped around his thin torso. His body a collection of taut wires that tremored slightly, shoulders hunched up around his ears. Still muttering something under his breath that sounded more like “no, no, no , no, nO” the more Karkat listened.

Karkat stepped closer to Gamzee, reached out one hand unwaveringly still. Gamzee stopped pacing and shook, staring down at Karkat. Fuck he had grown tall, Karkat thought, but pushed it down.

Karkat stood on his toes to reach up and lay his hand on Gamzee’s cheek, smoothing it gently up and down. The thrum of his pulse spiked slightly again, Gamzee flinched but did not move away, his gaze meeting Karkat’s full on for the first time.

“Shoosh, Gamzee.Shooooosh.”  

When Gamzee did not flinch again or push Karkat away, Karkat brought his other hand up to cup Gamzee’s cheek.

“Shhhhh, shoosh. It’s okay. You’re okay. Shoosh. I got you.”

For a long moment, Gamzee stood stiffly, his arms at his sides, and looked down at Karkat with an unreadable expression. Something in Gamzee’s lanky frame snapped, and the tension bled out from him. He slumped down, nudging his face into Karkat’s hands, a rumble of contentment rising in his chest.

Something that Karkat had long ago dismissed, but that felt so right that it settled into his bones, wrapped another layer of warmth around his bloodpusher to join the one already there.

The feeling of pale serendipity settling into place.

***

For the first time in a long, long time he felt at peace. The absence that gnawed at his pan and his bloodpusher retreated, circling around him instead of sheathing its claws in his flesh.

When those hot, rough hands had caressed his face and the soft susurrus of a shoosh reached his ears, he felt a strong sense of deja vu, memories from another time settling into place. It felt good, it felt right. How he had not realized he missed it until then.

What lay before him was familiar, something he remembered, in another world, being a source of comfort for him. There was a moment where he stood on a precipice, wondering if he should step back, while he had the chance. It was so tempting to give into the feeling, to ignore the consequences that would inevitably arise from doing so. 

Gamzee hesitated. Then he let the hesitation slip away. He let himself fall headlong into that feeling, still wondering if it was the right thing to do.

 

***  
With a long, gangly arm slung over his shoulder, Karkat half walked, half dragged Gamzee out of the woods. For his size he was startlingly light, but it made it all the easier to bring him back.

Together they sneaked through the back yard and through the side door of the house.There was no one home, but Karkat felt as though the neighbor's eyes were burning into the back of his head. Karkat manhandled Gamzee into the spare bedroom upstairs and through to the connecting bathroom. Gamzee looked and smelled as though he had been living rough in the woods since he had last seen them. Gamzee was pliant but backed away from Karkat when Karkat tugged at his clothes so that he could take them off.

Without much prompting, Gamzee dropped his clothes onto the floor and stepped into the tub, hunching down to sit, arms wrapped around his knees. The knobs of his spine protruded alarmingly and Karkat could see each of Gamzee’s thoracic struts. Karkat toed the pile of discarded clothing into the corner. They were ragged, and had questionable stains, but were otherwise surprisingly clean. He would have to get Gamzee something else to wear regardless.

“So,” Karkat said, leaning over Gamzee to turn on the water. He tested it against his hand, not too hot but not chilly either, and turned on the shower. He detatched the shower head and brought it over Gamzee. Water soaked into his hair, flattening it against his skull, while streams of brown water washed down the drain. “Uh, how have you been?”

Gamzee lifted his head up enough to look at Karkat from out the corner of one eye. ‘What do you think?’ his expression indicated.

“Okay, yeah, that was a fucking useless question,” Karkat backpedaled. “Let's just put that past us and focus on something else. Like you! You smell like you’ve been rolling around in a lusus’ decaying corpse, what the fuck is up in that?”

Gamzee shrugged.

“Why did I even bother asking,” Karkat said sarcastically, grabbing one of the shampoo bottles standing around the rim of the tub and squirted the contents onto Gamzee’s hair. Gamzee shivered violently as the cold goop dribbled down his neck. “You never really took care of yourself when we were still pre-pubescent excuses for trolls, so there's no real reason that that would have changed.”

Gamzee didn’t say anything but Karkat could hear a brief honk, like a muffled chortle.

“Oh yeah, ha ha ha, laugh it up, chuckleton,” Karkat snorted, bending down so that he could scrub at Gamzee’s hair. Eurgh, he was pretty sure half the contents of the wood’s undergrowth was caught up in there. As he picked out twigs and bits of leaves out and massaged the shampoo into Gamzee’s scalp, Gamzee’s shoulders drooped and he relaxed his arms from their grip around his knees. A faint purr rumbled from deep in his bony thoracic cavity and Karkat felt his own face heat up with a blush.

Was he moving in too fast, too soon? Gamzee hadn’t seemed to mind when Karkat had calmed his ass down back in the clearing and he certainly wasn’t opposed to it now.   

The next half hour passed in a blur. When as much as possible of the forest grime was washed down the drain, Karkat gave Gamzee some space to dry off while he put sheets on the spare bed and stacked boxes that he and Dave had been stuffing into this room, to take care of 'later', to clear up space. When Gamzee came out of the bathroom, Karkat gave him one of his old sweaters and a baggy pair of shorts and considered whether it would be worthwhile to bother throwing Gamzee’s ragged, grass (or who even knew what) stained clothing in the wash or if he should just burn them.

Karkat and Gamzee sat down on the rickety guest bed. At that moment Gamzee seemed to be more present than he had in the bathroom, in the woods when Karkat found him. His eyes were clear, his posture relaxed. He glanced at Karkat and looked back down, fiddling with the hem of his borrowed sweater.

Karkat wrung his hands, braiding his fingers together and twisting them apart.

“You can stay here for as long as you need to,” he told Gamzee. “I don’t want you have to go back to living in the middle of batshit nowhere.”

“You’d be up and willing to do that? After everything that went down?”

Karkat startled. It was the first thing that Gamzee had said to him directly in… a long time. He swallowed. “You did a lot of reprehensible, deplorable stuff. But everyone had their chance to make amends for what they did, or they’re still trying to. You never had that chance.”

“But, yeah, of course I would.  I will”, he added. “Unless, um, you want to forget what happened back in the woods and, uh, all this.” Karkat waved hoped he wouldn’t say no. It had felt right, to be able to bring Gamzee down from a rage, to ground and settle him.

Gamzee straightened up and faced Karkat, turning to press his forehead against Karkat’s. He papped Karkat’s face lightly, his icy fingers like a balm. “I ain’t opposed to it if you are.”

Karkat leaned into his touch with a faint chirp. A cool calm, like a wave, moved down his body. But there was still something that he needed to say. He pushed himself away from Gamzee. 

“Are you going to leave again?”

Gamzee’s expression was difficult to read. He looked at Karkat with something like regret, something like tentative hope. “Not this time, best friend.”

***

Karkat made sure that Gamzee was comfortable, promised that he would bring him something to eat later, before leaving the room and closing the door gently behind him. 

“What are you doing?”

Karkat jumped and spun around. Dave was standing at the top of the stairs behind him.

“Holy shit, don’t do that! Where did you come from?”

Dave raised one pale eyebrow. “From downstairs. I braved those treacherous elevated steps just to see what you were doing.”

He leaned to the side to look past Karkat to the door. “What are you doing actually?”   

“Nothing at all, let’s go back downstairs.”

“Yeah, how about no.”

“Wait! Dave, you feculent toadstool don’t open the-!”

Too late. Dave was at the door and opening it before Karkat can finish his sentence. He doesn’t enter the room, instead sticks his head in through the open door and backs out after a few seconds.

Dave quietly shut the door and turned to face him. “Karkat, why is there an overgrown clown chilling in the guest room?”

“I, uh, found Gamzee,” Karkat said weakly.  “Surprise?”

***

The two of them reconvened in the kitchen where Karkat went through the process of boiling water and making tea. Kanaya gave him several types of dried roots and leaves that she insisted were ‘Good For Relieving Stresses Of The Body and Mind.’ This was a good as time as ever to try it out. He made a separate cup of tea for Dave, Apple Cinnamon flavor, which he thought tasted like burnt tree branches, but Dave insisted he loved, so he made sure that they always had it in the pantry.

Karkat sats down and slid the other cup of tea across the table to Dave.  

“So that’s what you were doing on your ‘nature walks,’” Dave said. “You were looking for Gamzee.”

“Not really. Not at first.” 

“I don’t think that he’s entirely… there,” Karkat continued. “It’s not like when he was eating those disgusting sopor pies. Those made him mellow and spaced out but-- Now.” He gnawed at his lips, trying to find the right words. “He barely spoke to me when I brought him back here and he keeps staring off into the distance for no real reason.”

Dave thumbed at his mouth before Karkat chewed his lip raw. “Like the lights are on but nobody’s home, yeah?” Dave suggested.   

“Not exactly?” Karkat brushed Dave’s hand away from his mouth but held on to it,  resting their joined hands on the table.  

“This is really bothering you, isn’t it? Usually you never take this long to think of something to say. Your wordfroths come pre-packaged and organized by scenario type so you’re ready to whip them out the second you need them.”

“Hardy har har,” Karkat deadpaned. “If ever I fail to conjure up, I know you’ll be there with your eloquent at the ready.”

“You know it, Karkles.”

“Back to the subject at hand though.”

“Yeah, the purple crotchsquash currently sleeping upstairs,” Dave nodded, a facsimile of seriousness. “When he wakes up, what’s going to happen?”

“He’s been living the life of an unsuccessful arboreal hermit and needs time to recover. He was a wreck when I found him,” Karkat bit out angrily. He dragged his free hand through his hair. “Are you- Urgh. Would it be okay if he stayed here?”

“You brought Fido home, so now you gotta take care of him and feed him. He’s your responsibility, Jimmy.” 

***  
Gamzee lay still, staring up at the ceiling, as the sounds of Karkat and someone else talked faded. He waited until their footsteps retreated entirely before sitting up. He brought up the collar of the sweater to his face and took a deep breath. It smelled musty, like it had stuffed somewhere dark for a while, but he could still smell something of Karkat in it.

Karkat had accepted him back so quickly, so easily. He had been so willing to help Gamzee, to calm his mind when it had been in disarray.

He still remembered, more clearly than he wanted to, the crunch of the trident made as he stabbed Karkat. Karkat’s calls into the darkness, him sleeping alone on the pile, waiting, waiting, slowly being worn down by his absence.

But this was not the same Karkat. He did not remember everything like Gamzee had, or he would not have been so willing to grant Gamzee repentance. That Karkat was dust, (his fault, done by his hands), that had been then wiped away. He could never get his amends on with him now, not really. He hadn’t had the chance to do so the second time around either, kept under the watchful supervision and control of spidertroll. He hadn’t really had the desire either, not until the end when he couldn’t get his talk on at anyone. Not until everything came to an end, when it was too late.

Gamzee rubbed his eyes and stared out of the window. The sun had long since set and the world was colored in twilight blue. He lay back down, curled the blanket tight as he could around him.   

He could try again this time around. New world, a chance to make amends anew with Karkat, nothing else in his pan other than himself. The fresh memory of Karkat’s warm hands on his face settled over his mind like palest snow and he drifted to sleep.

***  
The next few weeks passed by at a plodding pace. Gamzee resembled a skeletal model hanging in a doctorterrorist’s office less and less, though he was still langy as anything. He steadily lost that faraway look in his eyes he had when Karkat found him.

Dave gave him and Gamzee space, since Karkat still was not sure how Gamzee would react to the person who sent him the video that shook his faith and set him off his rocker in the first place.

Karkat nearly had a bloodpusher attack when he came home one evening after spending a few hours with Rose and Kanaya, to find Gamzee and Dave sitting together at the kitchen table. He half expected for there to be blood stains splattered up the walls. Instead they were arguing via a vicious round of slam poetry but seemed no more likely to maim each other. Afterwards, they were not best friends by any stretch, but they tolerated each other’s presence at least.

Gamzee did not leave the house much, but Karkat would occasionally find him standing at the edge of the woods, but seemingly staring at nothing. He would always come back with Karkat though. He never talked about where he had been for the last few years, but would lay his head in Karkat’s lap and listen as Karkat talked about the latest book he had read or Dave’s latest remix or about Jane’s studies in business or how Eridan and Sollux were vacillating once again. Sometimes he would join Karkat and Dave when they watched movies, a silent presence to Dave and Karkat’s commentary to the movie.

They still had not settled into a pile, had not really jammed. Whenever Karkat or Gamzee came close to initiating a full on pale jam session, there was a moment, not tense but close, and they drifted off into doing something else. 

Karkat increasingly noticed how Gamzee, when he thought Karkat was not paying attention, looked at him with an intense gaze. Like he was testing the waters but too wary to jump in yet.

Karkat distanced himself from Gamzee when he did this. He didn’t want to jump into it. His moirail and his Dave living semi-peacefully under one roof made him content and happy. He deserves it, he argues with himself, after everything they all went through. This fragile peace was worth it. It was. It was.  

Like thin ice, the delicate peace cracked. 

One late afternoon, more than a month after Karkat had found Gamzee, Gamzee cornered Karkat and said the words that Karkat had hoped he would never have to hear.

“We need to talk, bro.”

Karkat swallowed. “Of course.”

He followed Gamzee upstairs to what had been the spare room but was now Gamzee’s. Not much had changed in the time Gamzee inhabited it. Most of the boxes were gone and only a few scattered items, dry and crumbling leaves and a well-thumbed joke book, indicated anyone lived there. Otherwise, the room was bare. Karkat wondered why before, with a jolt, he remembered that Gamzee had had nothing with him when he Karkat found him. If he did, then it was back in the clearing. They had never gone back to retrieve any belongings Gamzee might have had.

Gamzee sat heavily on the bed and patted the spot next to him. Karkat sat down.

Gamzee chewed at his lip, looking to the side as he decided where to start. Karkat fiddled with the sleeves of his sweater, not wanting to push Gamzee to speak before he was ready. After a few minutes, Gamzee breathed in deeply. 

"I gotta thank you for letting me stay here while I get my recoup on," Gamzee started. "But there's been things I didn't tell you, didn't want to tell you because I did so much shit, I wasn't sure you'd have it in you to forgive me. For good reason."

“Half my soul is missing and I don’t know if it’s the harsh whimsy part of me or the hateful part and I am sorely afraid of testing myself to see which it is.” He grasped his head in his hands, fingers snarled into his hair.

Karkat reached out to him, wanting to soothe the pain away, but Gamzee stopped him with a sharp “no!”

“No, Karkat,” Gamzee said, looking down at him. “You can’t- You can’t soothe this away, not now, not yet.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with this, I’m here to help! I’m your goddam moirail aren’t I, what’s the point of it if I can’t even help you?”

“Karkat you have more good in you than you know to do with,” Gamzee laughed, his expression strained and taut. “And brother, you don’t even have the full knowing of what I’ve done. I don’t know if you’ll want to keep papping an’ shooshing me after I tell you this.”

Karkat leans forward slightly and gently pried Gamzee’s fingers out from his hair. Then he  grasped Gamzee’s face firmly between his hands and looked him in the eyes. Gamzee’s gaze flicked down, not meeting Karkat’s, but after a long moment he looked up back at him. Karkat made sure that Gamzee was listening before he spoke. “You are a heinous clown and I know that better than almost anyone. I- I haven’t really been the shining example of a good moirail either. I kept thinking that everything was okay because I didn’t want to rock the boat any more than it needed. I wanted things to be like they were before all this shit went down.”

Gamzee flinched at this and Karkat felt like a piece of crap. He pushed on. “But things can’t be like they were before. So much happened and we both changed too much for it to be so simple. I’m sorry for holding on to that for so long.”

Gamzee reached for Karkat and this time Karkat went to him. They settled against the bedframe, Karkat wrapping his arm around Gamzee’s waist, his head ucked under Gamzee's chin. Gamzee grasped Karkat’s free hand between his own thin ones and leaned his head into Karkat’s hair.

He told him. Everything. How he had left Karkat, everything that went down with Terezi, the lack of control when his mind was led around like puppet, how willingly he had given into it. What he did to Karkat, to everyone, before the very end.

“It was … easy, I done convinced myself that it was at least, because I was doing it because it was RIGHT. I listened to treacherous whispers and I followed their every word. BECAUSE MY NEWFOUND FAITH PUT ME ON THE PATH TO RIGHTEOUSNESS AND I WAS THE AGENT OF THE MESSIAHS and to do their bidding was the ultimate show of faith. But, it really motherfucking wasn’t bro. ”

“Everything I did had an intended effect and I knew it.  But my pan never went far into thinking about what I did besides that it would be worth it in the long run. Was it really worth it, brother? All that pain and devastation was rendered null after the wicked collaboration with red shades sis and windy bro. It was most mighty pain in the ass to be tossed aside and kept under spiderbitch’s boot, but there was no real suffering down that road.”

“And now,” Gamzee drew a shuddering breath. “What’s left of me is mine and mine to decide what to do with. No puppets, no false messiahs, no creeping spiders in my mind. I don't know what to make of myself now, who I am. But I reckon I know who I could be. And, I don’t want to mess it up, not again”

Karkat sat up stiffly, attempting to process everything Gamzee had told him. Then he started laughing, jagged jolts of mirth that left him hunched over, arms curled around his middle. 

Gamzee jolted and moved to pull his arm off of Karkat. Karkat grabbed it and pulled him back so that they were nestled against each other.

“I thought this was going to be so easy!” he said, “It felt so right to be your moirail, I thought that pale serendipity would just… make everything work without any trouble.” 

Gamzee rumbled in agreement. “I think that even when there is serendipity you gotta work at it or it will all fall apart for nothing.”

“When did you get so smart?”

Gamzee grinned ruefully. “Tends to happen on occasion when you go through as much as my sorry self and live to tell the tale.”

Karkat sighed. "I'm sorry that I made you feel like you couldn't talk to me. And I'm not going to kick you out so that you can starve in the woods again." He paused. "But, that was... some really messed up stuff that you told me. Like holy shit, Gamzee."

"I know."

"Are... we still going to make this work? Can we? We both really rushed into it. At least I did, pretending everything was hunky dory when it was most completely fucking not!"

"I can understand why you wouldn't Karbro. But... I wouldn't be opposed to trying again."

Karkat pulled Gamzee down so could look at him straight on. He took a deep breath. "Neither am I. So, lets try this again. Gamzee," he said, "do you want to try going on this weird journey that is moiraildom with me?"

"Third time is the motherfucking charm, so I've been told."

"Holy shit Gamzee, we are having a progressive moment, please don't ruin it now."

Gamzee grinned. "Not a chance at that. Not with you around."

"You've got that right."

**Author's Note:**

> The prompter asked for a healthy relationship... which I intended to be fluff but then it ran away and turned into this. Relationships are hard and they are not always magically healthy or good for all involved parties. It takes work to get to the point where a relationship is healthy and sometimes involves examining parts about yourself that you would rather ignore. This my attempt to show that.
> 
> A huge thank you goes to Faithbegetsfaith and Nachttour. Without their advice and insight, this would have been an otherwise shapeless blob of difficult to articulate emotions.


End file.
